Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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To borrow something Malcolm Muggeridge once said, from the beginning of my life I never doubted that words were my métier. This is due, I am sure, to the fact that I was born to a reading family. Books adorned every shelf and niche in our house. My father, being a schoolmaster and a translator, had one of the most varied home libraries. He was a teacher of physics, hence the hundreds of books on science in our house. But he was also a lover of literature and had a number of languages, including English which was in those days the medium of teaching, German, French and Italian which he learnt as a hobby.

I must have inherited this love of reading from my father. I have always been fascinated by words, in particular printed words, and their power and beauty. I still remember how, after obtaining my Secondary School Certificate, in the science section, I set out to enroll in the Faculty of Science, as was expected of graduates of my section.

On the way, however, I found myself switching to the Faculty of Arts, and the English Section (as the department was then called) in particular. In those days, the 1930's, there were no restrictions on joining higher education, and graduates of the science section could join any faculty. During those more liberal days, the doors of the universities were open to all knowledge seekers.

Apart from the influence of my home environment, there were also some outside factors that contributed to my love of words. My father was a member of the Committee of Authorship, Translation and Publishing, one of the first cultural NGOs. Among its members were such leading intellectuals like Taha Hussein, Ahmed Amin, Hussein Fawzi and others. My father used to take me, while still a child, to the meetings of the Committee.

This gave me a chance, at a very early age, to rub shoulders with these great men. This early exposure to writers and their world must have further ingrained the love of words in me. And with this came the love of languages. Again thanks to my father, I learnt French as the second foreign language, after English, of course.

French was a must in the secondary school, and our teachers were French. Besides learning it at school, my father enrolled me in a French course at Berlitz, an extra-mural institute of languages. These French courses soon paid off. While still a student at the English Section of the Faculty of Arts, I was training as a journalist with Le Journal d'Egypte, at that time the leading French newspaper. It was there, under the guidance of Edgar Gallad, one of Egypt's leading editors, that I learnt the ropes of the profession.

I had a weekly column which mostly took the form of interviews with the members of the Committee of Authorship, Translation and Publishing. I still remember how, when I could not find a subject for my column, I went to Gallad for advice. What he advised me to do has since become my motto in my journalistic career. "Go out on the balcony", he said, "and look at the passersby: there you will find your subjects". The paper's offices were on Kasr El-Nil Street -- hence the unending stream of ideas for my column.

Call it stream of consciousness or diversion, but when I began writing this column I intended writing about an English writer and academician I respect. I just finished Melvyn Bragg's book The Adventure of English: The Biography of a Language, all about his choice of 12 books that changed the world. There are times, however, when memories manage to get the better of one's thoughts.